Copyleft: the magazine

We’ve seen this before, but it still hurts every time. Walmart.com’s digital music service has announced in an e-mail to customers that it is going to shut down its DRM servers in about a week as it switches over to a completely DRM-free shopping experience. So, as of October 9, all you’ll be able to buy from Walmart.com is MP3s without digital rights management, but all the non-MP3 music you bought from them will no longer be transferable (without that obnoxious step of burning to CD and re-ripping them into MP3s).

While it’s nice to see the world’s largest retailer finally giving its customers what they want, those consumers that bought into the old ways of buying music are still getting hurt by the music industry’s previous unwillingness to give-up digital rights management. Sadly, this is a cautionary tale both to those of us who buy media, and other media outlets like the movie industry, that, in the end, DRM will only hurt you.

(via Ars Technica and Engadget)

Borrowing aspects of Hungry Hungry Hippos, Creative Commons’ promotional materials and McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto, the Free Culture Game by La Molleindustria has succeeded in doing what few have tried: simplifying the complexities of the debate over intellectual “property” into a flash video game. Your job is simple, just use the blue copyleft symbol to feed an information hungry populous fresh ideas from the Commons before the evil “Vectorialists” pull those ideas into the Market and rot the brains of your little people with copyrighted, commoditized ideas (turning them into grey automatons, it seems). Overall, the game play is relatively simple and keeps you on your toes, particularly for a game that’s so obviously an attempt to push ideology.

The Free Culture Game: only you can save the world from mind-numbing copyrighted content.

While we here at Copyleft: the magazine are all for attempting to change people’s perceptions of intellectual “property”, it is clear that the Free Culture Game has its downsides. It clearly promotes the theory of the Commons, that the free flow of ideas will create more innovation while commodification of information stifles creativity. However, the game definitely simplifies the idea of copyright, stigmatizing a concept which is, essentially, the basis upon which Creative Commons licenses are based. Without copyright law, there is no way to enforce Creative Commons licensing (or GPL, GNU or any other of the myriad free licensing regimes out there right now). So, while we applaud the effort as another fine attempt at cultural hacking (and a well crafted time waster), we wish there was a better attempt to push people toward more solid information, instead of putting something out there that, if the RIAA had done it, we would have immediately labeled propaganda.

(via Boing Boing)